Terror designation a way to hike North Korea pressure

During a Cabinet meeting on Monday, Trump said the decision "should've happened a long time ago" and claimed the move will add pressure on the "murderous regime" to "end its unlawful nuclear and ballistic missile development".

South Korea's spy agency said on Monday the North may conduct additional missile tests this year to improve its long-range missile technology and ramp up the threat against the United States.

The president said new sanctions were on the way for North Korea, invoking, Otto Warmbier, an American college student who died days after his return to the US earlier this year.

Moreover, the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that a new package of US sanctions against North Korea would be broader and would affect more entities than punitive measures that have been imposed in the past.

"As we take this action today, our thoughts turn to Otto Warmbier and others affected by North Korean oppression", Trump continued, underlining the legal case for the designation.

Relations between the USA and North Korea have been fraught ever since President Trump took office.

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The U.S. State Department now lists Sudan, Syria and Iran as nations that have "repeatedly provided support for acts of global terrorism".

In response, a state-run North Korean newspaper called Trump an "old lunatic" on Sunday and derided his visit to South Korea as "nonsense". "Putting them back on accomplishes nothing", Lt. Col. Eric C. Anderson, a retired U.S. Air Force Intelligence Officer who spent most of his career focusing on North Korea, told Newsweek".

Putting North Korea back on the USA list of state sponsors of terror ups the ante in Trump and Kim Jong-un's public battle, which has sometimes veered toward the personal. The North has not been publicly implicated in a terror attack of that scale since.

Neither Mr Trump nor the State Department specified which acts of terrorism and assassination the North had supported. North Korea's state media said Kim inspected a hydrogen bomb.

North Korea is pursuing nuclear weapons and missile programs in defiance of U.N. Security Council sanctions and has made no secret of its plans to develop a nuclear-tipped missile capable of hitting the US mainland.

North Korea was on the terrorism blacklist for two decades after the 1987 bombing of a South Korean airliner killed 115 people.